Twenty women at half depth

Claim (verbatim)

The trobairitz corpus is some twenty named women and, depending on the anonymous-piece rulings, on the order of thirty to forty-six pieces (Bruckner's Songs of the Women Troubadours), a single melody - the Comtessa de Dia's A chantar, carried by the French-made W - and a concentration of unique copies in one collection, H (Vatican, BAV lat. 3207), whose compiler took an antiquarian interest in the women and equipped them with miniatures and razos. This conjecture claims the women's survival is systematically shallower than the men's, not merely smaller: the pieces that made it were carried by fewer books each, so the female corpus stands closer to the cliff-edge of single-witness existence than a size-matched male sample would. The mechanism is circulatory. Transmission breadth tracked the network a song moved through, and the trobairitz - composing inside court circles but largely outside the professional joglar economy that carried men's songs from court to court and eventually into multiple regional repertories - entered fewer of the channels the anthologists later drained. One compiler's curiosity is doing for the women the preservation work that an entire itinerant profession did for the men, which is why removing a single manuscript from the tradition would erase more of the female corpus than of any comparable male slice.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: in BEdT, taking the trobairitz roster of Bruckner's edition as the extraction rule, the mean number of witnesses per trobairitz-attributed piece will be at most half the mean witnesses per piece across the male-attributed corpus, and at least one-third of trobairitz pieces will be single-witness, with H the largest single holder of those unica (primary clause: the at-most-half witness-depth ratio; the verdict follows it). The one-melody arithmetic stands as context, not a clause. The test voids if the roster yields fewer than 25 pieces with usable witness lists.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: BEdT per-song witness lists filtered to the trobairitz attributions - mean witness depth against the male corpus, unica census, and the identity of the top unica-holding manuscript.

Novelty / leakage triage

anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run

The shallowness of trobairitz transmission, the concentration of unica in H with its miniatures and razos, and the Comtessa de Dia's A chantar in W as the corpus's single melody are established in the trobairitz editions, and Angelica Rieger's corpus edition tabulates the witnesses per piece; but the male-side comparator has never been computed - no published figure gives mean witness depth across the BEdT corpus for the ratio to stand against - so the at-most-half depth clause of the primary is un-run.

• M.T. Bruckner, L. Shepard & S. White, Songs of the Women Troubadours (New York, 1995)
• A. Rieger, Trobairitz: Der Beitrag der Frau in der altokzitanischen hofischen Lyrik. Edition des Gesamtkorpus (Tubingen, 1991)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.